Tiger Woods’ magical, mythical 2000 season even more impressive today

Billy Andrade had an embarrassing but relatable moment at the 2000 Arnold Palmer Invitational presented by Mastercard.In the first round, with the group having begun on the back, Tiger Woods hit a shot that was so good, so mesmerizing, that Andrade was incapacitated.“He’s 3-under after three,” Andrade told PGATOUR.COM. “And we get up on the 13th tee, and he steps up and he hits a stinger. I was just like, ‘Oh, my God.’ It would be like somebody getting on their knees and getting a shotgun and aiming right down the middle of the fairway and shooting the gun, the trajectory was this high off the ground.Woods won nine times, had a scoring average of 68.17 to break Byron Nelson’s 55-year-old record (68.33), and compelled Jesper Parnevik, among others, to wonder if he had Jedi powers. Woods broke or tied 27 PGA TOUR records and nearly contravened the old maxim (and Bob Rotella book title): Golf is not a game of perfect.In a recent sit-down with PGATOUR.COM, the 82-time PGATOUR winner said it was “an evolutionary thing that happened,” going back to the swing change he adopted and eventually perfected with coach Butch Harmon after his epochal victory at the 1997 Masters.“That took the better part of a year, year and a half to implement,” Woods said. “And then ’99, I got rolling and it just bled into 2000, but it was all the hard work that I’ve done through the middle part of ’97, the struggles of ’98, struggles early part ’99, just getting efficiently better.”Somewhere around THE CJ CUP Byron Nelson in May of 1999, Woods’ swing changes clicked into place. He won seven of his next 10 starts that season, including his last four straight.“It just rolled into 2000,” he said.And it did so immediately.Woods beat Ernie Els at The Sentry at Kapalua, where both players eagled the 72nd hole and birdied the first playoff hole. (Woods ended it with a long-range birdie on the second.)“That one still stings a little,” Els told PGATOUR.COM. “Man, I played good golf.”Woods made up a seven-shot deficit with seven to play to edge Matt Gogel and Vijay Singh at the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am, his sixth straight win. (He tied for second at the Farmers Insurance Open a week later, leaving intact Byron Nelson’s record of 11 straight in 1945.)He won the Arnold Palmer Invitational presented by Mastercard, and in mid-May made a groundbreaking equipment change. He put a new two-piece Nike ball, made by Bridgestone, into play at the DP World Tour’s Deutsche Bank-SAP Open TPC of Europe in Hamburg, Germany. Although he didn’t win, he tied for third and especially loved the way the ball performed in the wind.At the Memorial Tournament presented by Workday, he won by five with the new ball, then declared that every aspect of his game could get better.And that’s when things got crazy.Woods’ 15-shot U.S. Open win was the largest margin of victory in a major, even as he was unwittingly down to his last golf ball in Round 2. (He’d forgotten to refill his bag after a putting session in his hotel room the night before.) Woods won The Open Championship by eight, becoming the youngest (24) to complete the career Grand Slam, and he also won the PGA Championship in a three-hole aggregate playoff over Bob May, joining Ben Hogan (1953) as the only players to win three men’s professional majors in a season.He won the WGC-NEC Invitational in the dark (by 11 shots over Justin Leonard and Phillip Price).At the RBC Canadian Open, where Woods became the only player besides Lee Trevino to win the U.S. Open, The Open Championship and RBC Canadian Open in one summer, he hit a decisive fairway bunker shot on 18 – 218 yards from wet sand over the water, in the gloaming – that became an instant classic and held off Grant Waite.Tiger Woods